Customer perceptions of “care” – insights from UK CSI

The latest issue of the UK’s Customer Satisfaction Index (January 2026) by the Institute of Customer Service reveals key insight into what customers actually value. Here’s our take on it.

Key insights

• Different types of customer place different emphasis and value on individual aspects of care (as is to be expected).

• While all types of customer place a relatively high value on the ability to speak to a person when necessary, this is even more important for those with high financial well-being (30.7%) than for those with low financial well-being (28.5%).

• Those with low financial well-being value instead place relatively high value of being listened to and understood (31.7%), compared to those with high financial well-being (28.7%) – suggesting this is key to supporting the most vulnerable customers.

• Investment in technology to improve efficiency is more highly valued by those with high financial well-being (30.3%) than those with low financial well-being (22.4%).

What “care” means to UK customers

The UK CSI research is based on asking 15,000 UK customers about their perception of CX across six key categories:

• Customer centricity

• Responsiveness

• Communication

• Efficiency

• Employees

• Safety and trust

At a category level, the factors customers value roughly correlate with the telecoms industry’s general perception of importance.

Relative importance of six key categories of CX to customers

However, this overly simplistic analysis hides detail and fails to capture the complex interdependencies of different factors or their relative perceived merits.

For example, customers may desire a fast response overall, but if the response doesn’t resolve the matter first time, then it’s less desirable. Thus, over-valuing response time and undervaluing first call resolution is a mistake. And we know from other data points from the survey that only 78.7% of customers said telcos ‘got it right first time’ – meaning around one-fifth of customers (21.3%) are either dissatisfied with their telco’s initial response or the problem wasn’t fully resolved. This is a poor level of performance compared to other industries in the UK - around 4.5 percentage points below the average of all 13 industries - and placing telecoms as 10th out of 13 industries for right-first-time performance.

Customer-centric design is not perceived by customers as particularly important, but this is likely because they simply don’t really know what it means or how it affects factors they do value. Done well, customer-centric design reduces effort and speeds resolution (both of which are highly desirable qualities).

More granular analysis shows there are key differences between different types of customer. Customers who consider themselves financially well off have a different perspective to those who consider themselves to be financially constrained, which is unsurprising. How this affects what they value is interesting though.

While all customers value being able to speak to a CSR if they need to, being listened to and understood is relatively more important to those with low financial well-being. This points to how telcos should manage and communicate with customers in different ways – more vulnerable customers may need more explanation, more emotional support, more clarity and more time. This is something that banks and building societies have put great effort into and it has played out in their results. There was a time (pre 2008) when their performance was little better than that of telcos; but the banking sector has shifted public perception remarkedly in the last 15 years and is now a high performer which, despite the sensitive nature of finances, delivers high levels of customer satisfaction.

Analysis of the aspects of experience UK customers value